In a quiet Montmartre alley, tucked between a crĂȘperie and a forgotten bookstore, there was a cafĂ© that didnât exist on any map. The sign above the door simply read: _Le Hasard Heureux_ â _The Happy Accident_.
Amélie Poulain, with her wide eyes and camera in hand, had stumbled upon it while chasing a trail of heart-shaped stones someone had mysteriously laid out across the cobblestones. She pushe...
_If victory had a taste,_
It would be bold, a flavor not misplaced.
A sip of champagne, crisp and sweet,
A hint of salt from sweatâs defeat.
It lingers like honey, slow and warm,
Born of battles weathered through storm.
A bite of citrus, sharp and bright,
Awakening senses in the pale moonlight.
Itâs the crack of bread at a feast of kings,
The nectar that triumph endlessly brings.
But woven withi...
The song grew louder as the days passed. It was always there, whispering at the edges of her awareness. Eve started to hear it in places it couldnât possibly be: on the static-laden intercom of the subway, in the shuffle of leaves on the sidewalk, in the way her coffee pot gurgled in the morning.
Her sleep suffered. At night, the melody would wrap itself around her dreams, leaving her groggy and ...
Eve didnât know when the song first appeared in her life. It felt as though it had always been there, a ghostly hum threading through her days. It wasnât a tune she recognizedâno pop song from the radio, no childhood lullaby. Just a strange, mournful melody that clung to her like fog on a winter morning.
At first, she thought it was in her head. Sheâd hear it in the quiet moments, like when she w...
Neo was walking down a quiet street, lost in thought, when a voice called his name. He turned around, confused. A stranger was running toward him, breathless, eyes darting around as if they were being followed.
âI donât know who you are. Do you know me?â Neo asked, stepping back cautiously.
The stranger, a young woman dressed in worn-out clothes, grabbed his arm. âNeo, we donât have time for thi...
Thereâs a joke that ends with â huh?
Itâs the bomb saying here is your father.
Now here is your father inside
your lungs. Look how lighter
the earth is â afterward.
To even write father
is to carve a portion of the day
out of a bomb-bright page.
Thereâs enough light to drown in
but never enough to enter the bones
& stay. Donât stay here, he said, my boy
broken by the name...
On the lee slope of the small coastal mountain
which conceals the sun the first hour after its rising,
in the dry, steep ravines, the live
mist of the heat is seething like dust
left over from an earlier world.
A crow with a swimmer's shoulders works
the air. And a little bird flies up into a
tree and closes its wings, like a blossom
folded up into a bud again.
In the distance is a very o...
**Always that spectral fragment. Filament of line cast back there.**
_Where open-mouthed fish rise to gulp down shiny lures._
**_I sang once in an auditorium to almost empty rows._**
_I looked for my people in the seats, under the seats, behind_
**the seats, but they werenât there. I called the three people**
_who were there to come up and introduce themselves._
They were young aspirants. A
Th...
In the dim light of their cramped studio apartment, Mia tossed a crumpled paper at the wall, missing the trash bin by inches. Alex, sprawled across the worn-out sofa, barely glanced up from their phone.
"I don't think about that," Mia mumbled, more to herself than to Alex, as she contemplated the looming deadline of her art project.
"You don't think about anything," Alex retorted without missing...
At first there's no lake in the city, at first there are only
elevators, at first there are only constricting office desks;
there are small apartments and hamburger joints and
unpaid telephone bills. Then a few nightclubs appear and
eventually the lake disinters. At times there's a highway
and a car and friends in a snowstorm heading nowhere but
back to the city and Sarah Vaughan is singing ...